The digital freedom risk: too fragile an acknowledgment

At least at first, freedom dies without human beings
being physically hurt. The author is convinced that the freedom risk is the
most fragile among the global risks we have experienced so far. He calls for a
digital humanism.

Share this

Read more!

Get our weekly email

Enter your email address

The Prism scandal has opened up a new chapter in the
world risk society. In the past decades we have encountered a series of global
public risks, including the risks posed by climate change, nuclear energy,
finances, September 11 and terrorism – and now the global digital freedom risk.

All these global risks (with the exception of
terrorism) are more or less part of technological development, as well as of
the misgivings usually expressed in the phases of modernization of any respective
new technology. And now we have Edward Snowden’s disclosures. All of a sudden,
something is happening that turns the global risk – in this case the digital
freedom risk – into a globally public problem. However, the risk logic at work
here is different from what we have known so far.

Whereas the accidents in the reactors of Chernobyl and later on
Fukushima triggered a public debate about the nuclear power risk, the
discussion about the digital freedom risk was not triggered by a catastrophe,
because the real catastrophe would actually be an imposed hegemonic control on
a global scale. The self-image of the information hegemony imposed, however,
does not allow for this global risk.

In other words: this particular catastrophe would normally happen
without anyone noticing. We have become aware of the potential catastrophe only
because a single secret service expert from the United States applied the means
of information control in order to tell the world about the global risk, and we
are faced with a complete inversion of the normal situation.

Our awareness of this global risk is, at the same time, an extremely
fragile one, because, unlike the other global risks, the risk we are dealing
with does not focus on, result from or repeatedly refer to a catastrophe which
is physical and real in space and time. It rather – and unexpectedly – interferes
with something we have taken for granted, i.e. our capacity to control
information, which has almost become our second nature. But then, the mere
visibility of the matter triggers resistance.

Let us try and explain the phenomenon in a different way: first of all
there are some features all global risks seem to share. In one way or another
they all bring home to us the global interconnectedness in our everyday lives.
These risks are all global in a particular sense, i.e. we are not dealing with
spatially, temporally or socially restricted accidents, but with spatially,
temporally and socially delimited catastrophes. And they are all collateral
effects of a successful modernization, which questions retrospectively the
institutions that have pushed modernization so far. In terms of the freedom
risk, this includes: scenarios in which the capacity of the nation state to
exercise democratic control fails and other cases in which the calculation of
probabilities, or insurance protection, etc. do so too.

Furthermore, all these global risks are perceived differently in the
different parts of the world. We are faced with a “clash of risk cultures”, in
order to offer a variation of Huntington’s concept. We are also faced with an
inflation of existential catastrophes, and with one catastrophe threatening to
outdo the other: the financial risk “beats” the climate risk; and terrorism “beats”
the violation of digital freedom. This is, by the way, one of the main barriers
to any public recognition of the global risk to freedom, which, therefore, has
not yet become the subject matter for public intervention.

The latter is, clearly, changing today. Yet, the acknowledgement of this
fact is a rather fragile one. Who could the powerful player be, with an
interest in keeping this risk alive in public awareness and thus pushing the
public towards political action? The first candidate to come to my mind would
be the democratic state. Alas, this would be like asking the fox to look after
the chickens. Because it is the state itself, in collaboration with the digital
trusts, that has established its hegemony in order to optimize its key interest
in national and international security. Any movement here could, however,
constitute a historic step away from the pluralism of nation states towards a
digital global state, which is free from control.

The citizen is the second potential player on our list. However, the
users of the new digital information media have, actually, become cyborgs. They
employ these media as if they were senses, and consider them an integral part
of their concept of how they understand and act in the world. The members of
the Facebook generation, because of their dependence on social media, are on living
within these media, in doing so, relinquish a relevant part of their individual
freedom and privacy.

Who, then, could exercise this kind of control? It could be, for
example, the Basic Law. Alas in Germany, Article 10 stipulates that postal and
telecommunication secrecy is sacrosanct. That sounds like a phrase from a world
long gone, and by no means fits the communication and control options provided
by a globalized world. In other words: Europe, for example, provides excellent
supervisory agencies, a whole range of institutions who try to assert
fundamental rights against their powerful opponents, e.g. the European Court of
Justice, data protection officers, and parliaments.

But paradoxically enough, these institutions fail, even if they work.
Because the means of defence they have at hand are restricted to national
territories. While we are dealing with global processes, they are bound to use
the tools of intervention developed in the last century. This applies, by the way,
to all global risks: The national answers and the political and legal
instruments our institutions offer can no longer meet the challenges posed by
the global risk society today.

All this might sound very pessimistic. Yet, we must go one step further
and ask, whether we – social scientists, normal citizens, and users of digital
tools – know the right terms in order to describe how profoundly and
fundamentally these are transforming our societies and politics. I believe that
we lack the categories, maps or compasses we need to navigate the New World.
This, again, corresponds to the situation in the global risk society at large.
Successful modernization and an escalating technological evolution have
catapulted us into fields where we may and must act, without providing us with
the vocabulary we need to adequately describe or name these fields and our
options for action.

An example might help explain our position concerning the freedom risk.
We tend to say that a new digital empire is coming into being. But none of the
historical empires we know – neither the Greek, nor the Persian, nor the Roman
Empire – was characterized by the features that mark the digital empire of our
times.

The digital empire is based on characteristics of modernity which we
have not yet truly reflected upon. It does not rely on military violence, nor
does it attempt to integrate distant zones politically and culturally into its
own realm. However, it exercises the extensive and intensive, profound and
far-reaching control that ultimately pushes any individual preference and
deficit into the open – we are all becoming transparent.

The traditional concept of the empire, however, does not cover this type
of control. In addition, there is an important ambivalence: We provide major
tools of control, but the digital control we exercise is extremely vulnerable.
The empire of control has not been threatened by a military power, or by a
rebellion or revolution, or by war, but by a single and courageous individual.
A thirty year-old secret service expert has threatened to topple it by turning
the information system against itself. The fact that this kind of control seems
unfeasible, and the fact that it is much more vulnerable than we imagine, are
the two sides of one and the same coin.

The individual can, indeed, resist the seemingly hyper-perfect system,
which is an opportunity that no empire has ever offered before. The brave can
resort to counter-power, if they choose to offer resistance on the job. One of
the key questions is, therefore, whether we should not oblige the major digital
companies to legally implement a whistleblower union and, in particular, the
duty of resistance in one’s profession, maybe first on a national scale, and
subsequently at European level, etc.

However, John Q. Citizen – unlike Snowden – does not know much about the
structures and the power of this so-called empire. The young Columbus travels
towards the New World and uses social networks as an extension of his
communicating body. The world vision of the new generation incorporates the
benefits offered – be it with respect to the organization of protest movements,
to global communication, or to digital love. From all we can see, the young do
not fear being controlled by the system.

An important consequence becomes evident here. How we assess the risk
posed by the violation of freedom rights differs from our assessment of a – perhaps
health-related – violation as a consequence of climate change. The violation of
our freedom does not hurt. We neither feel it, nor do we suffer a disease, a
flood, a lack of opportunities to find a job, and so on. Freedom dies without
human beings being physically hurt. The power and legitimacy of the state are
based on the promise of security. Freedom comes or seems always secondary. Being
a sociologist, I am convinced that the freedom risk is the most fragile among
the global risks we have experienced so far.

What should we do? I suggest that we formulate a kind of digital
humanism. Let us identify the fundamental right of data protection and digital
freedom as a global human right, which must prevail like any other human right,
if needs be against all odds.

Is a lesser approach feasible? No, there is no lesser goal. Currently we
are being told to apply the new methodologies of encryption in order to protect
us from attacks by those who want to track us. This approach, however, implies
the individualization of a problem that is, in fact, a global one. And the true
catastrophe is, as we have seen, that the catastrophe disappears and becomes
invisible, because the control exercised is becoming an increasingly perfect
one. This happens to the extent to which our reaction in view of the imminent
death of freedom remains an exclusively technical and individual one.

We lack, indeed, an international body to enforce such claims. In this
respect there is no difference between the freedom risk and the risk posed by
climate change. The litany has always been the same: The nation-state cannot do
it. There is no international player who can be addressed either. But there is
general concern. The global risk has an enormous power of mobilization that
goes far beyond what we have ever had before, e.g. the working class. A crucial
factor would be to politically combine the unrest that has activated social movements
and political parties in different countries to varying degrees, in order to
push them towards the idea mentioned above.

But, is this the way to implement standards on a global scale? The
permanent reflection about the dangers for friend and foe alike could, indeed, trigger the creation and
implementation of global norms. The sense of what is right or wrong with
respect to global norms would result ex
post from a global public shock about the violation of these norms. We are
bound within a historical development that brings us to this point time and
again: We need a transnational invention of politics and democracy.

Related

This article is published under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. If you have any
queries about republishing please
contact us.
Please check individual images for licensing details.